My gf's cat, or our cat rather, was diagnosed with cancer last week. They told us that masses of cancerous tissue had taken over so much of his abdomen that it was difficult to even find his stomach on the X-ray, which would explain why he refused to eat, and so, basically, either we could ask them to perform additional tests and then some combination of chemotherapy and surgery and maybe other treatments, which they said ultimately would not save his life, but give him at the most another year of suffering, or we could have him euthanized. I think nature must have invented cancer in retaliation against our attempts to control it, although of course retaliation isn't the right word, it's just that we can never guess even a fraction of the effects any of our actions will have, and cancer is devised (although again that is exactly the wrong word, because what I am saying is it's a counter-device, that thwarts our devising) to remind us that the tiniest particles that get accidentally mixed into things as residue of some industrial process or filter out up into the sky -- they are not nothing, and even the smallest of these negligible particles in fact has the power to murder, and once this forgotten particle has pronounced its sentence no hospital in the world can overturn it. So we took him back to the vet, my gf in tears the entire time, and the nurse sedated him with a small needle which only sort of worked, and then did it again 15 minutes later, and then a few minutes after that came in again with the bigger needle that would kill him. The nurses I thought were fake nice, like they had the posture and tone of someone in a movie present in the moment of death, but not like they were thinking about it. Proust says that it may not be easy to see this when you're a child, but Giotto's "charity" looks the way she does because actual real charity is severe and efficient, because it has to be, it is doing a job, and taking that job deadly seriously. I think sometimes that the women who work in a veterinarian's office partly do so because it allows them to look "down" at the animals that are brought in to them. But as Kafka says, to see a small animal you have to hold it up to you at eye level. As the nurse pushed the second, bigger needle into the shaved off bit of the forepaw he growled a little bit, as though he were slightly annoyed, and a moment later his heart stopped. Every few hours now my gf asks me in tears if I think it possible that they didn't sedate him enough and that he really suffered. We then wrapped him up in his blanket, and tried to close his eyes which wouldn't close but kept looking about in a way that made me think how manifestly two-directional normal living vision is, and gently got him back into his carrier. I can barely even think about how pliable and lolling his body had become, how his head kept trying to push out of the mesh part of the carrier and onto my lap. I held him with his head sort of propped up in his carrier as we drove to the Bohemian National Cemetery, where the man who operated the crematorium promised he would wait for us even though it was several hours after closing. In the storm a gnarled tree had fallen over in front of a Gothic-looking house for employees of the cemetery, blocking the road, so we carried him the rest of the way to the outbuilding where we were to meet this man. He was hunchbacked, and he spoke the way some workmen do, never an unnecessary clause or word. He was not "solemn" but his voice was kind, like what he knew of the world he knew well. How often do you ever meet someone who can really see what he is doing? While we were in his company my gf stopped crying just for a little while. He showed us the furnace and he showed us his trays of little glassware items that he also made by its heat, and he insisted that we take one as a remembrance, a swirl of color like some kind of primitive micro-organism, suspended in a pebble of clear glass.
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